The biggest date for most people in the Irish blogosphere in the coming weeks won’t be Mother’s Day. It will, of course, be the Irish Blog Awards held on March 1st in the Alexander Hotel in Dublin.

Before that, under the umbrella of IWTC, will be the inaugural Ireland Geek Girl Dinner, organised by Martha Rotter and sponsored by Microsoft. This event isn’t totally exclusive, as men can attend, but only when invited by one of the geek girls. Since Paul Walsh had been begging for an invite for a while now, I finally took pity on him and invited him!

The end of the week sees the 2008 Irish Blog Awards ceremony taking place at the Alexander Hotel. Once again, Damien Mulley has put in a phenomenal amount of work in organising this event. Unlike some of the other technology awards ceremonies on this island, it’s a more informal event, costing only €10 entry, which is donated to charity. The shortlists have now been announced and the hard-working judges have slogged their way through reviewing all these blogs in order to find the winners in each category.

On the same day as the ceremony, several different meetups have been arranged, as people take the opportunity to catch up with those travelling in from round the country. Firstly, we have Red Mum’s Photo Meet, where they are welcoming people of all skill levels for a simple non-themed photo walk - should see some great shots out of this!

Just after this is the Ladies Tea Party, organised by designer extraordinaire Sabrina Dent. If you’re not into tea, then don’t worry - Microsoft Ireland have kindly offered to sponsor some nibbles on the day and I think a lot of us will be swigging back Martinis!

Sabrina was also responsible for the wonderful logos in use for the Photo Meet, Gourmet Brunch and Tea Party:

On the day after the Blog Awards, Deborah is organising a Gourmet Brunch for those left around Dublin.

A few others will be heading directly back to Cork for WebCamp/BlogTalk 2008, including a bloggers dinner that is currently being organised by Alexia Golez / Tom Raftery. However, I reckon that I’ll be taking a rest on the Day after the Blog Awards!

The following weekend sees the latest incarnation of the BarCamp phenomenon in Ireland. CreativeCamp in Kilkenny Castle on Sat 8th March. I’ll be attending, along with my Husband, George. He, along with several of his colleagues, will be representing Blacknight, who have been sponsors of all the Irish BarCamp style events so far. Their MD, Michele Neylon, was even kind enough to purchase the domain barcamp.ie when I bugged him about it, so that all future Irish camps can have their own sub-domain there.

I’m also delighted to see that the CreativeCamp organisers have ditched the traditional wiki format completely. It never worked on the previous camps, and I’ve bitched about it at length before. They have a lovely sign-up system, where people can input the details of the talks / panels that they want to organise and it transfers to the speakers page here The exact same applies to the registration and attendees pages.

I’ve signed up to be on one of the panels, entitled: Women & Technology - grabbing the blogosphere by the balls - a panel discussion facilitated by Krishna De on women & technology (as titled above).The panel includes Elly Parker, Sabrina Dent, Martha Rotter & Alexia Golez. I guess I should really start prepping for this to make sure I have something coherent to talk about!

Firstly, and most importantly the photos are up here (even though I didn’t manage to get any of Tom dancing, and missed that as I had to leave early…). There’s even a photo of TwentyMajor in there, but I’m not saying which one!

A great night was had by all, even if Grannymar didn’t win. It was great to catch up with old friends and new alike and see the fantastic and fabulous of the Irish Blogosphere.

Kudos should go mainly to Bernie Goldbach for winning and then immediately giving away to Damien his award for Best Contribution to the Irish Blogosphere, the standing ovation that Damien got was certainly well deserved. Bock the Robber and his entourage won the award for best-dressed men, while the girls of beaut.ie won best dressed females - but in fairness, who else could that have gone to???

I was delighted to see Conor win Best Blog Post for his hilarious vasectomy story, and he and the wife profited from having a night away from the kids! We twittered back and forth all evening, so it was good to have the updates, even if he was only sitting 5 rows down from me! Hope the hangover isn’t too bad today Conor!

Finally, big thanks to all the organisers and especially Suzy, who live blogged the results of all the awards from the back of the room. A full list of all the winners can be found here.

See you there again next year!

It’s your last chance to vote in the Irish Blog Awards! Voting closes at 5pm today (Ireland time).

I’ve been nominated in the Best Newcomer category, but more importantly - Grannymar (my Mum) has been nominated for Best Podcaster and also for Best Podcast for ‘The Favour’ on her blog ‘Oldbones’.

So please head over and vote for Oldbones in the Best Podcast and Best Podcaster categories - she really deserves it!!!

Click the image below to take you to the voting page…

As I’ve said in a few other posts, I was attending meetings in the Phoenix area of Arizona last week. Although we were in solid meetings all day from 8am - 5pm (and sometimes later), I was still able to get out and about seeing old friends and shopping.

I have a huge amount of thoughts and observations on AZ, but I can’t be bothered to type them all, so I’m going to do something that Mum has been bugging me to do for ages, and throw together a podcast, it should be up later this week.
Talking of Mum, I called her when I landed back in Heathrow - with the 7-hour time difference and her having ‘thrown out’ her back last week, I just never got a chance to talk to her while I was away. Practically the first words out of her mouth were “I got two nominations, and you only got one!”. She was, of course, talking about the Irish Blog Awards, the shortlists for which had been announced while I was flying back over the Atlantic.

It seems that someone out there likes what I do, as I’ve been nominated in the Best Newcomer category, while Mum managed to rake in nominations for both Best Podcaster and best Podcast (for ‘The Favour‘ - her FIRST EVER podcast!). Voting is now on until Friday 16th Feb and then the top 5 (?) in each category go forward before the panel of judges.

So go forth and vote for ellybabes for Best Newcomer!

There’s a lot of strong competition in the category, but I’d love to even make it to the final five on the shortlist and have an excuse to go to the awards ceremony…

And while you’re there, you may as well pop in a vote for oldbones in the Best Podcast and Best Podcaster cetegories!

I seem to have not really suffered with Jetlag this time, which is unusual for me, but I’m very glad that I didn’t, as the next few weeks will be very busy - there’s only 17 weeks until ‘the wedding’ apparently and I still have to squeeze in work trips to Israel and Vietnam before then, nevermind planning the whole wedding thing!!!

Nominations are now open for the 2007 Irish Blog Awards. The field is strong this year, and I doubt that I’ll get nominated for anything, but you never know.

Twenty is bound to be a shoo in for a few awards again - how he keeps up his phenomenal content in such a prolific fashion is beyond me…

I hope that Beaut.ie does well, the girls have really found a gap in the Irish blogosphere and have gathered a large crowd of admirers already - not bad for a few months work.

Another noob (in the blog sense only!) is Grandad over at HeadRambles - someone who rarely fails to put a smile on my face on a daily basis! And having checked out his Testimonials page, it seems a lot of people agree with me, including my mother!!!